Abstract
Word order in Japanese sentences is relatively flexible. Many research reported scrambling effects, that readers comprehend sentences with non-canonical word order harder than canonical sentences, however. This study investigated the relation between scrambling effect and semantic plausibility of sentences. Forty embedded sentences and forty fillers were prepared for this experiment. Twenty sentences were canonical and twenty were scrambled. The accusative case marked object (NP-o) in the relative clause was placed in the sentence-initial position to create scrambling sentences. We also manipulated sentence plausibility. Participants were timed in a phrase-by-phrase self-paced reading task. In the region revealing semantic plausibility, the reading times for the implausible condition were longer than the plausible condition for canonical sentences, whereas there was no reliable effect of plausibility for scrambled sentences.
